paperandglue.net

"Freedom" by ahmetorhan

For a long time, I’ve struggled to find a way to think about Remembrance Day. There are so many contradictions at play. At the same time as I have deep respect to those people who commit their lives to military service, I’m critical of a military culture that creates a breeding ground for misogyny and rape. While I believe that instability and tyranny in many Middle East countries was created by the interference of foreign governments, I can’t support the notion that a wholesale withdrawal of foreign troops from those countries is going to make anyone — in those countries or in the rest of the world — safer.

Our modern wars, fought so far away yet transmitted back to us on our tiny TV and computer screens, seem so disconnected from the white-haired veterans who stand at attention next to the cenotaph on November 11. Remembrance Day is part childhood nostalgia — folding your felt poppy in half to make comical fake lips; listening to sermons given by your teachers about honour and sacrifice; attending all-school assemblies with at trumpeter playing Reveille. It’s part brutal reality — the sick feeling in your stomach when you think about Colin Powell arguing that there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, because he, himself, did believe it; the pain in your chest when you read about African children abducted and pressed into guerilla military service in wars that started long before they were born; the tightness in your throat when you hear about a kid gunned down in your city, a refugee from a war-torn home who escaped only to be pulled into the street-level wars perpetuated by gangs in your so-called “first world” country.

For me, Remembrance Day isn’t as much about remembering the past as it is about remembering the present. That there are 30-odd active “conflicts” on this planet right now.

My forebears were refugees during World War II. My great-grandfathers were conscripted into military service; one died in a POW camp. My great-grandmother was raped by Russian soliders. My grandmother, grandfather and their siblings were malnourished and terrorized by living through war, and all of these facts, these events from the long past, have ramifications for my family even today.

For my family, these horrors are our history. For millions and millions of humans living today, it’s their present. That’s what I think about on Remembrance Day. Women who struggle to keep track of their children in the chaos of war (my grandmother and her brother were once separated from their mother on a train journey west). Women who struggle to keep their children fed when food supply is anything but secure (my great-grandfather sold his wool coat to buy butter). Men who rot in cells as prisoners-of-war, losing hope of ever seeing their families again (my grandfather gave his fellow prisoner his blanket and wedding ring when he knew he was losing his battle with dysentery).

Remembrance Day is a day of from work, a blip in my comfortable Canadian life. But on this day, the least I can do is think of my fellow humans who aren’t so blessed by history, work harder to never forget them.